Visual Design articles

Empathy. It’s a virtue. It’s a valuable quality in any human being. It’s a distinct advantage in connecting to people. It’s also kind of the latest design buzzword. But it’s not just a trend. You see, designers are figuring out that being able to empathize with and understand other people leads to creating better interfaces for them. If you know their needs, you can meet them. If you meet their needs, they’ll stick around longer....

Design thinking is the idea that we can solve problems by practicing human-centered design—putting people at the centre of the problem solving process. Core to the idea of design thinking is that we focus on an overall goal, rather than say a specific problem to solve. While it can help us solve some of the world’s most complex problems (think global warming), we can also use it every day in the web industry, to help us solve our own complex...

Many who don’t live in Vancouver at least know the western Canadian city for a few things: Sky-high housing prices, green sensibilities, and lots of rain. Now, thanks to local design and digital activists, they also know Vancouver for…producing a new city logo that has been blasted for being uninspiring. In an open letter published on Medium, local Vancouver art director, Brock Ellis, lambasted Robertson’s and the City Council’s...

We’ve all seen Comic Sans; the typeface that’s both loathed and (secretly) admired—some people have even dedicated a website to educating people about the very limited use cases of comic sans! It’s made a huge global impact in the decades since its original use-case, Microsoft’s Bob program. By 1996, it was popular enough to be preinstalled on every Macintosh computer that rolled off the assembly line, but how exactly did this...

Digital products will always need to be redesigned. Styles progress, hardware technologies advance, and development possibilities are ever-increasing. Just in the past year the potential for implementing microinteractions, and processor-intensive animations and graphics, has come along at a fair pace. Product teams are continuously looking to iterate and stay ahead of or pass the competition. This is ever important in furthering...

Nothing can ruin a design like typography that doesn’t fit. Whether it’s too big (or too small), improper type scaling is a major problem. It’s a problem for more designs than you might think. Too commonly you visit a website where the type renders beautifully on a desktop browser, only to revisit later from a phone and find it difficult to read. It happens all the time. The issue is that the type wasn’t truly scaled for each device. It’s...

WeTransfer is one of the mostly widely admired start-ups of the last decade. In many ways it embodies what we tell our clients to aspire to: a simple idea, solving a common problem, well executed. What really makes WeTransfer standout is the high-value it places on design; since its launch in 2009, WeTransfer has used design to add interest to what is typically a mundane process: transferring files from one computer to another. WeTransfer has...

When you design for the web, no matter the industry, there are expectations that must be met, and realities that must be accounted for. Although this is true for all forms of web design, it is especially true for logo design. This is something we’ve encountered numerous times. Think about the many different conventions of logo design. They’re usually placed in the top left-hand corner of the page, they are usually linked to the homepage,...

It seems like the current buzz word in the design industry and everyone wants one. But how exactly can a product benefit from having a living, breathing design language? I’m going to try break down the very basics so you can understand why it’s needed. Creating an underlying language will unite our design philosophies and methodologies across our platform. So why do we need a design language? There are two ways of looking at it, from an internal...

We’re all familiar with the old Zendesk logo, right? The memorable image of the Buddha who’s wearing a headset (melding old-fashioned mindfulness with modern-day tech) was an instantly recognizable logo of a big brand in today’s tech industry. Now, the new Zendesk logo is a combination mark of a logotype or wordmark design together with an iconic or symbolic logo while the old one with the Buddha was your classic iconic or symbolic logo....

The most successful brands understand that knowing their audience and how to communicate with them is vital to their success. For better or worse, it often comes down to a simple logo. We’ve all seen our fair share of re-brandings and logo transformations. The history behind an established brand is essential and changing something familiar to the masses may alienate devoted followers. With history in hand, older brands are able to incorporate...

One of the more lucrative projects for designers these days doesn’t even involve desktop. That’s because, in the last few years, more and more people have switched to mobile use, which also includes time spent shopping. A good rule of thumb as a designer is to go where your users are flocking, and you’ll find plenty of value there. Designing for retail apps is extremely interesting because it all comes down to conversions. One wrong design...

As a designer you’re expected to make the impossible happen. Time and time again, you’re expected to take an incredibly complex process and make it easy, simple and beautiful. When it’s handled well, you feel like a rock star. When we fail to live up to those heavy expectations, it leaves many of us feeling... deflated. Designers tend to be perfectionists by nature, we’re our own worst critic. We take those mistakes personally, as if...

You encounter emojis on a regular basis in your 21st-century, tech-savvy lifestyle, but what is the history of emojis? They’re all over the place, and you really can’t interact with any device or platform these days without someone sending you an emoji or you sending one out yourself. This speaks to the ubiquity of this form of communication. You spend some time on social media, and emojis are all over the place, whether it’s through Facebook’s...